Booth C5

Metropolitan Pavilion

125 W 18th Street

New York, NY 10011

For the Outsider Art Fair New York, Stellarhighway is excited to present a group show of domestic-scale paintings by Mike Ousley, Ayin Es, Will Thomson and Timothy Wehrle alongside unique and limited edition books by Ayin Es, Manal Kara and Lucy Sallick.

Ayin Es (b. 1968, US) is a nonbinary self-taught visual artist, writer, musician (drummer), and book artist from Los Angeles, California. Growing up in their family’s garment business, Es fled an abusive situation at the age of 15, started making art and became a drummer in a punk band, touring North America and topping charts. Es was diagnosed with physical and mental disabilities in their 30s, at which point they stopped touring to dedicate themself wholly to their studio. Es’ books and paintings presented at the Outsider Art Fair explore the intentional and unintentional aspects of self, identity and spirituality. They are based in Joshua Tree, CA.

Manal Kara (b. 1986) is a Moroccan-American artist and poet based in Gary, IN and Ridgewood, NY. They work across sculpture, installation, photography, video, and text, using a bio- and eco-semiotic framework to elaborate a poetics of the disenfranchised, dislodge hegemonic ontologies, and devise new ways of theorizing the world. Their two unique artist books at the Outsider Art Fair are prime examples of this path, employing a supposed language of posthumanity to describe an ultimate mixing of physicalities.

Mike Ousley (b. 1976; US) paints a direct commentary on Appalachian life and folk traditions, though the simplicity and strangeness of his work occult its depth. Ousley’s paintings are, at first glance, simple stories told in the folk tradition—tight vignettes of a memory, some odd anecdote or an old tale. Upon further reflection, they represent a broader struggle of the Appalachian peoples to secure their collective identity via a rich heritage of storytelling. For the Outsider Art Fair, Ousley presents two new paintings on panel that expand his exploration of Appalachian and American folklore. Drawing inspiration from a saying his father often provided (“They might have more money, but we have more fun,”) these paintings masterfully dovetail the region’s rich visual and cultural heritage with its contemporary existence.

Lucy Sallick (b. 1937) finds meaning in the richness of family history and first hand experience. Making work in painting, artist books and sculpture, Sallick has been practicing for over 50 years, with studios in New York and Maine. Her idea of self as something built through a web of associations collected through time, descendant and ancestor, is core to her studio. Genres of still life and landscape interweave with images from home and studio: clay pieces by the children; groceries on the table; embroideries resting on a pillow; paint tubes, brushes, and sketches of landscapes on the studio floor, sometimes arranged, sometimes not. In her watercolors and oil paintings, Sallick will often paint pictures within pictures—recreating a work she had previously created within a still life, or combining views of familiar shorelines in uneven grids across giant sheets of paper. Ultimately an exploration of the self as an entity constructed from myriad parts from across time and space, Sallick’s studio records actions and thoughts as the past moves into the present.

Will Thomson (b. 1992; London, UK) makes work that explores the physical and metaphorical barriers that shape our relationship to the world. His multi-layered paintings in our booth reside in their own processes: they are a series of corrections and alterations, an attempt to make sense of what came before and to recognize how history and experience inform understanding of our environment.

Timothy Wehrle’s (b. 1978; Burlington, IA) obsessive artwork is a patchwork of scenes both real and imagined. In them, the artist’s emotional labor unfolds: an ongoing quest for a sense of self and belonging. Wehrle creates intricate drawings, paintings and sculptures that carefully blend nostalgic yearnings with stark depiction of everyday life and psychological states. Influenced by Persian miniatures, comic books, sacred mandalas, folk art quilting, and the kaleidoscopic drawings of Adolph Wölfli and Augustin Lesage, Wehrle’s paintings presented here are complex and layered images exploring subjectivity and personal experience.